Albert Bandura and Dale Schunk collected forty children whose teachers had flagged them as badly behind in math. On the pretest, a third of them could not solve a single subtraction problem. Another third could solve one.
The children were given seven sessions to work through forty-two pages of subtraction material at their own pace. Same room, same pages, same seven sessions, same instructions. The researchers varied one thing, which was the goal they suggested at the start.
One group was told they might consider finishing six pages each session. One group was told they might consider finishing all forty-two pages by the end of the seventh. A third group was given no goal and asked to get through as much as they could.[1]
Six pages a session for seven sessions is forty-two pages. The two goals describe identical work at an identical pace.
By the end of the fourth session, the children working toward six pages had finished 74 percent of the material. The children working toward forty-two had finished 55 percent, and the children with no goal 53 percent. A lesson took the first group 21 minutes on average, against 29 and 30 minutes for the other two.[1]
The distant goal did not beat having no goal at all.
What the near goal built
The gap did not stop at pages finished. Children who worked toward the near goal finished with a stronger sense of their own capability than any other group, and with a more accurate one. Shown problems and asked to judge whether they could solve them, they were right 80 percent of the time. The other three groups ran between 51 and 60 percent, and their errors were overestimates.[1]
On the hardest problems, the near-goal children were the only treated group whose persistence rose significantly between the pretest and the posttest, close to doubling the time they were willing to spend before giving up.[1]
The last measure was taken a day later, in a session where the children could choose freely between subtraction problems and a symbol-matching puzzle, for as long as they liked. Ninety percent of the near-goal children chose to do subtraction. In each of the other three groups it was around forty percent.[1] Every one of these children had been recruited on the grounds that they disliked math, yet the children who had near goals wanted to do more math.
Bandura described what he had tested as attainable subgoals that lead to larger future ones. Simply put, the near target got them further, faster, than the distant target did.
A target that moves
Marc Adams and colleagues ran a four-month trial in which one group was given the standard recommendation of ten thousand steps a day, and another was given a goal recalculated from their own recent performance, set high enough to require more than they had been doing and low enough to sit inside what they had shown they could do.[2]
The fixed ambitious goal produced the bigger jump at the start. It also decayed more than twice as fast, and by the end of the four months the moving goal was ahead.[2]
What we built
Habit trackers give you one goal, and often the way you determine what the goal should be is to guess at what you want. "I'd like to do this x times per week." Typically, the goal you start with is also the goal you want at the end. In other words, most goals are set with the idea that we should start at the finish line, with our only option being success by hitting it or failure by missing it.
Try Easier is a habit progression system. You have one goal for the weeks when stuff comes up, life feels heavy, or who knows what happened, happens. It's called the floor, it's once a week and it never changes.
Your next goal is the ceiling. When it's time to set this target you'll be asked how difficult you think the habit will be, which will recommend a starting frequency that is likely lower than you might desire. You can override it, but the point of using a habit progression system is to grow from where you start to where you want to finish.
Finally comes the progression. When you exceed your ceiling regularly, you can raise it. So every week has a target, a backup plan, and a stretch goal. Hit that stretch goal of exceeding your ceiling, and you start the process of raising it, which takes a few more weeks.
Every week you have a goal you can actually reach, and exceeding it is what moves the goal. Your focus stays on the process rather than the outcome, because the process is what builds the outcome.
You still end up at the finish line. You just don't start there.
